, but also other religious and metaphysical
claims—is unknown or unknowable.
Agnosticism can be defined in various ways, and is sometimes used to indicate doubt
or a skeptical
approach to questions. In some senses, agnosticism is a stance about the difference between belief
and knowledge
, rather than about any specific claim or belief.
I say that I am an agnostic. People think that's pusillanimous and covering your bets. But it's not based on any belief or yearning for an afterlife but on the fact that we actually know so little about the cosmos. It is a tribute to the complexity and, at our present stage of development, the unknowability of the universe.
Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.
One should not have the arrogance to declare that God does not exist.
I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "agnostic." It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant. To my great satisfaction the term took.
Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe.